Dover, part 2

I'm reading through the decision in the Dover trial. On page 64, the judge explains why intelligent design is not science:

We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation.

"Supernatural" means, literally, "above the usual limitations of reality". Whether you're talking ghosts or gods it's outside the scope of science -- there's no way to show if it's real, imaginary, or fraudulent, no way to determine whether its effects are reliably repeatable, and no way to test its effects in any material manner if it's a fundamentally immaterial concept. So given that throughout the course of history, 99.999% of supernatural explanations have been completely without merit and the other 0.001% have been debatable at best, you don't use it in science.

(2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's;

The dualism he mentions refers to the idea that the once-popular attempts to use science to prove Genesis were based on: you must believe that either the bible is true verbatim or that there is no god. No middle ground. What ID claims is similar: the complexity of life is beyond my comprehension, therefore it could not be self-organizing, therefore it must have been God. (ID makes pains to say they don't specifically mean Jesus's Dad, but it's a thin sophistry -- an all-powerful entity that defies natural description catalyzed the creation of life as we know it. Who do they have in mind exactly? ID is modern creationism, nothing more and nothing less.)

and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. [...] ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research

Anyone doubting the merits of the first two items should seriously consider the third. Not a single research paper has been done in support of ID. No scientific organization supports it. The only semi-credible scientists who support it openly admit that it is not a scientific theory. (Michael Behe, one of the very few scientists who publicly support ID, deserves a closer look, but not now.) In fact, ID 'supporters' are really nothing more then evolution detractors -- the only evidence they've ever used in support of ID were criticisms of evolution, often weak or misleading criticisms too.

It's important to recognize the underlying hope of this type of creationism. Their assumption is that by tearing down evolution, people will believe in creationism, and therefore Christianity. (There are, of course, non-Christian creationists, but the Christians are the ones with the loudest voices and most influence.) Unfortunately what they haven't considered is that evolution in all its complexity and glory exists, whether we believe in it or not. It has always existed, always will exist, and nothing we say or do or think will change that. Maybe people will find faith in God in that, maybe they'll lose it, or maybe it will have absolutely no bearing on what they believe -- but my position is that if a denial of observable reality is necessary to sustain your faith, it was never very strong to begin with.

More on evolution later, perhaps.